Social Networking and Your Consulting Practice
- IECA’s group page on Facebook
by Sarah Brachman, Manager of Communications, IECA
Are you on Facebook yet? You should be simply because it’s an easy (and free!) way to market your practice, it can help you communicate with your colleagues, and it’s another way to stay connected to IECA members, schools, and programs. Once you have set up your Facebook page, join IECA’s group page where you will find recent news from IECA, discussions, national news articles featuring member consultants, and updates from schools and programs. Working with Facebook is fairly simple, and we can help you learn how to use it.
Here are four things to include on your Facebook page:
1. Under your photo (definitely include a photo), in the box “Write something about yourself,” add the name of your business and its Web address (include http:// to make it a live link)
2. In this same box, add information about your practice “specializing in school, college, and therapeutic consulting to help families with their educational decisions” for example.
3. On your “wall,” mention any campus tours that you have recently participated in, and include photos if you can. Let readers know what you have been doing to keep current.
4. Are you writing a blog? Add a link to your blog under your Web address, and add the actual blog feed to your page so every time you post a blog it shows up on your wall.
Do you want to keep your ‘friends’ list private so no one can see who your friends are?
You can create separate friends lists—for example, personal and professional. Then you can add different friends to different lists and edit their security settings. As you receive friend requests you can decide which group you want them in. It’s also helpful if you only want to share videos or photos with certain people. And you can send messages to these groups from the main friends page. To create a separate friends list, follow these steps:
- Go to your ‘Friends’ listing at the top left of the page.
- At the top of the page, click on ‘create new list.’
- Select all of your colleagues, for example, name this list ‘colleagues’ and select ‘create list.’
- At the top right of the page click on ‘Settings’ > ‘Privacy settings’ > ‘Profile.’
- Under ‘Profile,’ click on the ‘Friends’ drop down menu and choose ‘Customize.’
- At the bottom of this window under ‘Except these people’ type in the name of the list you just created (‘colleagues’).
Now the people on this list will not be able to see your list of friends. You can do the same for your Wall postings if you don’t want your colleagues to see what other friends post (just select the ‘Wall Posts’ drop down menu), and you can also restrict who sees your videos and photos.
Want to Hide Status Updates for Certain Friends?
It’s simple. Just hover over the status update of the friend you want to hide. The ‘hide’ button will appear on the right, and when you click it, it will say ‘hide [friend's name].’ Now that friend’s status updates won’t appear on your news feed, they won’t know it, and they will still remain on your friends list.
If you have Facebook tricks and tips you’d like others to know about, feel free to share them here!
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